


This Just Got Personal

by Erisabesu (ErisabesuFic)



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Drama, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-19 03:35:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22204549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErisabesuFic/pseuds/Erisabesu
Summary: “The first to find Yamamoto … is Hibari.”  [2010.06.17]Written in response to ch. 293; may contain spoilers.
Relationships: Hibari Kyouya & Yamamoto Takeshi, Hibari Kyouya/Yamamoto Takeshi
Comments: 5
Kudos: 80





	This Just Got Personal

**“This Just Got Personal”**

◊

The first to find Yamamoto—on the floor of the baseball team’s club room, wounded and seeping a slow, sickening stream of red that spreads outward from the pool beneath his body and flows along the grout lines in the tile in a kind of macabre gridwork—is Hibari.

It’s not that Hibari has been keeping an eye on Yamamoto. Nothing of the sort.

It’s none of his business how Yamamoto recently comes to school early for morning baseball practice, and stays well past normal club hours to play catch with one of the new members of the team, a transfer student; one Mizuno Kaoru, as stoic as Yamamoto is affable, as hard as Yamamoto is soft.

It’s none of his business how visibly elated Yamamoto is with Mizuno at his side, or how much effort Yamamoto puts in to help Mizuno feel included. To make him part of the team. To forge what he obviously hopes will be an unstoppable battery: two baseball fanatics connected by a simple, shared dream.

It’s none of his business how, with every hour that passes, Yamamoto’s smiles, his actions, his very presence is morphing into the shape of a typical herbivore, into a person unrecognizable from the warrior who fought in the Choice battle and stunned them all.

It’s none of his business, so Hibari has not been watching the baseball field from his spot in the shadows on the school roof, night after night these last days; as anyone can see he’s been guarding Namimori Middle School’s grounds against the threat of attack. Mizuno may have fooled Yamamoto into lowering his guard clear down into nonexistence, but Hibari can smell every bit of the danger these grouping Shimon students think they can hide, and he will not stand idly by and let them wreak havoc here in his school.

It’s really nothing more than coincidence that Hibari is the only one close enough to witness and then investigate the sudden surge of dying will flames there in the baseball team’s locker room.

But the moment Hibari discovers Yamamoto, it _becomes_ his business, and he’s not the type to let a thing like this go unpunished.

Hibari shrugs off his uniform jacket and covers him up, crouching down beside Yamamoto while using his cell phone to text Kusakabe with the code to alert the appropriate people and summon an ambulance as soon as possible. As usual, Hibari’s instincts were right. But for the first time it doesn’t give him the same satisfaction; by his standards, being only one step ahead of the rest doesn’t cut it. This senseless mischief should never have happened, but he’ll make it his business to bring it to a suitable end.

Yamamoto’s fingers somehow find the cuff of Hibari’s slacks. “Tsu…na…” he mouths, the syllables no more than a whisper.

Hibari exhales in a huff and takes out his handkerchief, wiping some of the blood and sweat from Yamamoto’s face, ears listening for sirens in the distance as precious seconds tick by. Vague memories surface from his older self and overlap the present in that strange, quasi-temporal way he hasn’t gotten used to yet.

Images of Yamamoto on a floor of rubble and suffering under the effects of the ring battle poison melt into a Yamamoto beaten down on the ground by Electric Gamma followed by a battered and crumpled Yamamoto collapsed at the feet of Genkishi… images which then reconnect to his real-time memories of discovering the same Yamamoto unconscious amid Genkishi’s illusionary grass field deep inside the Melone Base…

“You’re… always… saving me,” Yamamoto says, attempting to laugh, but choking instead.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hibari grumbles, smoothing cool fingers over Yamamoto’s brow.

Yamamoto’s mouth twitches. “Liar,” he whispers, fingers hooking Hibari’s and squeezing. He hardly has any strength, but such a gesture in this weak moment communicates volumes about the other set of inherited memories that link them together beyond the rescues or the battles or the blood… something perhaps they both find too surprising and unsettling to acknowledge aloud.

He’s furious that the Yamamoto he knows could be so gullible as to walk into an enclosed space with the enemy and wind up like this—was he _that desperate_? Just for someone to play baseball with him?

Yamamoto’s face is so pinched with the unique devastation that comes of betrayals like Mizuno’s that Hibari promptly loses all interest in berating him. At the sound of Sasagawa’s footsteps approaching at a run, Hibari gets up, cracking knuckles now stained with Yamamoto’s blood and heading for the door with only one thought on his mind.

“Don’t be so eager to die, Yamamoto Takeshi,” Hibari orders from the doorway before slipping between the school buildings in pursuit of Mizuno Kaoru, the first prey he will hunt down and destroy.

In the background, Ryohei’s exclamations of shock mix with the oncoming ambulance sirens in a horrible duet, but as far as Hibari’s concerned it is only a prelude—no Shimon student will go unpunished.

_Not a single one._

—

Ω


End file.
